Participants' responses here provide further insight into how much senior management teams buy into the importance of IT. Only 54 percent of respondents agree with this statement, which make you wonder what the other 46 percent are doing. An insurance executive told me a story of a claims initiative that some colleagues in "the business" presented to him, and which was later approved. The initiative involved the use of images, video, and audio to better understand the claims and so that experts could do more of the reviews and QA remotely. Late in the project, one of the managers came back to him and admitted a big mistake that would cost them several million dollars. Apparently, they forgot to estimate any storage for all of the digital media.

Half of our respondents think the business leaders have either neutral or negative attitudes in terms of IT's capabilities. My colleagues, Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross at MIT's Center for Information Systems Research, believe that service delivery is the basis for everything else. Before worrying about improving program management or executive dashboards, make sure that the basic IT services are in order. The CIO at a beverage company, for example, was having significant support issues with her peers in the business units. As a result, she set-up a "concierge" service specifically to deal with their needs and questions. This may seem extreme, but it reduced the noise and improved buy-in.